Modeling information diffusion dynamics over social networks

Information diffusion over social networks becomes a hot topic recently. Most of the existing works are based on the machine learning method with social network structure analysis and empirical data mining. However, the results learned from some specific dataset may not apply to the future networks, since the social network structure is in a highly dynamic environment. Moreover, the dynamics of information diffusion are also heavily influenced by network users´ decisions, actions and their socio-economic interactions, which is generally ignored by existing works. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary game theoretic framework to model the dynamic information diffusion process in social networks, which focuses on the users´ behavior analysis from a microeconomics points of view. We also conduct experiments by using real-world Twitter information diffusion dataset, which shows that the proposed evolutionary game theoretic model is effective and practical in modeling the social network users´ information diffusion dynamics.